Research shows that the income of professional authors averages only £7,000 in the UK, making the profession ‘inaccessible and unsustainable' to most
Links of the week December 5 2022 (49)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
5 December 2022
There are "serious questions about the sustainability of the writing profession in the UK" and "substantial inequalities between those who are being adequately rewarded for their writing, and those who are not", new research has found.
The report, commissioned by the UK Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and carried out by the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Research Centre (CREATe) based at the University of Glasgow, found that professional authors are earning a median of just £7,000 a year.
NEW YORK -- More than 150 literary agents, whose clients include Danielle Jackson, V.E. Schwab and L.A. Chandlar, have signed an open letter to HarperCollins vowing to "omit" the publisher from upcoming book submissions until it reaches an agreement with striking employees.
Around 250 entry- and mid-level staff members, from publicists to editorial assistants, have been on strike since Nov. 10, with the two sides differing over wages, workforce diversity and other issues that have become increasingly prominent across the industry. No new talks are scheduled.
"While many consider publishing to be a labor of love, we agents know how quickly that labor can lead to burnout, tension, missed opportunities for advancement, and mistakes," the letter reads in part.
"This generation of rising publishing professionals must contend with student loan debt, the rising cost of living, and the barriers inherent in working long hours without adequate compensation. These employees, many of whom bring with them the diverse viewpoints our industry lacks, have been essential to the production of the books we are so proud of."
It's not over yet: Nearly two months after being dismissed for lack of evidence, a potential class action lawsuit accusing Amazon and the Big Five publishers of colluding to fix e-book prices is back, having been been amended and re-refiled in federal court.
In a 125-page Second Consolidated Amended complaint, filed on November 21 in the Southern District of New York, lawyers led by prominent Seattle-based firm Hagens Berman once again accuse Amazon and the Big Five publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Random House) of a hub-and-spoke agreement to eliminate price competition from the e-book market in violation of the Sherman Act, specifically through the use of a Most Favored Nation clause and other contract terms.
The suit claims that Amazon is a monopoly that has used its market dominance to "coerce" e-book publishers into "entering into contractual provisions that foreclose competition on price or product availability." Such actions allow Amazon to reap "supracompetitive" profit margins on e-book sales, often in excess of 300%, and to harm consumers by keeping e-book prices artificially high.
Publishing Perspectives Forum was opened with the first entry in our Executive Talk series, featuring HarperCollins UK CEO Charlie Redmayne. As he'd confirm for our audience, Redmayne led his company to a record year in 2021. His trademark sense of humor-especially about himself and talk of success-kicked in almost immediately, however, reminding Frankfurt's trade visitors and exhibitors of why he's among the most forthcoming and engaging CEOs in the international business today.
"I sometimes wonder about CEOs who talk about record years," he said, "because one of the things that as a CEO you're meant to do is grow the business. Effectively, if you don't have a record year, that means you're in trouble. So we have thankfully continued to grow our business over the years, yes."
Quickly turning to the shifting and seemingly darker year-end terrain for publishing, though, he agreed, "As you said in your introduction, I think all publishers are facing some very, very significant challenges at the moment, from rising costs to others, but the key thing therefore, is to make sure you've got publishing that works."
Nearly three years after it was put up for sale by its parent company, Simon & Schuster is back at square one - wondering who its new owner will be. That is the position the nation's third-largest trade publisher finds itself in after Paramount Global chose not to extend the $2.175 billion sales agreement it had signed with Penguin Random House in November 2020, which was set to expire November 21.
The decision ended any chance PRH would have had to appeal federal judge Florence Pan's October ruling blocking the deal on antitrust grounds. According to the sales agreement, PRH could only appeal with the agreement of Paramount; with the deal now dead, Paramount will receive a $200 million termination fee.
In a statement, PRH said it was confident it could have made "a compelling and persuasive argument to reverse the lower court ruling on appeal," but that "we have to accept Paramount's decision not to move forward."
With Sri Lanka's Shehan Karunatilaka and India's Geetanjali Shree taking home two of publishing's biggest prizes, what next for one of the world's most overlooked literary regions?
Why isn't more south Asian fiction published outside the subcontinent? And is the tide now turning? As this year has shown, it's prizeworthy stuff. In October, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida took home the 2022 Booker prize, with Indian writer Geetanjali Shree and her translator Daisy Rockwell winning the International Booker prize for Tomb of Sand. The latter novel, which has also recently joint-won the Warwick prize for women in translation, was translated from Hindi, and was the first south Asian book to be awarded the £50,000 translation prize. For south Asian writers to win both Bookers in the same year was unexpected indeed.
Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said she worries society is suffering from an "epidemic of self-censorship".
In a BBC lecture on freedom of speech, the writer said young people were growing up "afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions".
Such a climate could lead to "the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity", the award-winning Nigerian author warned. "No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does," she added.
Adichie, known for novels including Half Of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, was speaking in the first of the four annual Reith Lectures for Radio 4, all this year on themes of freedom.
She argued that Sir Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses would "probably not" be published today - something he himself said in 2012.
The common wisdom tells us that time is money, but for a writer, money is time. Writing is not the same as typing-it takes much more time: time to gaze out the window awhile thinking, reflecting and dreaming your way onto the page for instance, to pause, reconsider, order your thoughts, conduct research, to write, of course, but also to read what you have written, consider it, change it, polish it. This is what grants and advances against royalties are for.
I was in my early 30s when I received my first advance. I can't remember the exact figure. Something like $14,000, and, of course, I only got half of that on signing. While this does not seem like very much now, in 1974, cobbled together with renting rooms in my house, workshop fees, and lectures, it allowed me to focus on writing my book. Since, as it turned out, Woman and Nature took me four years to write, the advance did not last long enough. But with a bit of luck and lots of nerve, I managed. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts during one of those years made a big difference.
Over time, as I gained readers, the advances increased. I received a relatively larger advance for 1981's Pornography and Silence, and that one took me far less time to write. During the period it took me to write that book, I felt relatively flush. But soon after it was in print, I was close to being broke again.
A poll conducted by the Publishers Association has found more than half of young readers credit BookTok, a subcommunity on the social media platform TikTok focused on books and literature, with helping them discover a passion for reading.
Of 2,001 16-25-year-olds surveyed by the organisation in October, 59% said that BookTok or book influencers had "helped them discover a passion for reading", while more than half (55%) said they turn to BookTok for recommendations. Moreover, 68% said BookTok had inspired them to read a book that they would have never considered otherwise.
The research also saw 38% of young people say they turn to BookTok for recommendations ahead of family and friends, while nearly one in five (19%) reported that following the Booktok hashtag helped them find a community. Another 16% reported that they had made new friends through BookTok.
Richard Osman, Mel Giedroyc ... every celebrity wants to be a novelist. But can they hack it?
Not so long ago, you couldn't move for celebrity memoirs. It didn't matter how famous you were - a television presenter, a professional footballer, some vaguely recognisable reality TV git - at some point you would write an autobiography (or bark some nonsense at an indifferent ghostwriter), give it a terrible title such as Reflections or Unfiltered or My Story and sit back as you watched the money roll in.
Now, celebrity autobiographies haven't gone away completely - two of the most inescapable books this autumn are memoirs by Matthew Perry and Bono - but they are sputtering out. After all, there are only so many celebrities in the world, and traditionally you can only tell your life story once. But if you are a public figure with a large and willing audience, you might be loath to give up all that sweet publishing cash, so what is a celebrity to do?
I thought I'd come to the wrong office: The entrance foyer to the publishing company was the color of a hospital waiting room in a second-tier city. As I slid my resume under the pane of glass at the front desk-like the ones ubiquitous then in Chinese restaurants, when crime in New York City was off the charts-I felt more like a heroine in a noir novel than an aspiring member of the literati.
I didn't know the job of book editor existed until I moved to New York with my then-husband. All I knew was that no one in my preferred fields of newspapers or magazines had responded to my inquiries.
I looked resolutely forward in my job search not because I was fearless, but because I felt I had no other choices. Work in "creative" fields was hard to come by, and my husband was a graduate student. We shared a railroad flat with the bathtub in the kitchen.
I've been on the bookish internet for more than 15 years, and in that time, I've watched platforms rise and fall. I remember talking about books on Livejournal, for Sappho's sake. I started a book blog called the Lesbrary in 2011, because I couldn't find an LGBTQ book blog that wasn't 90% M/M books. Of course, I started an accompanying Tumblr for it at about the same time, because I spent most of my time there. Years later, I'd join BookTube, and years after that, I even gave BookTok a try for a bit before slowly backing away.
Over that time, I saw the bookish internet grow and evolve, allowing for more niche spaces (like a sapphic book blog, for instance), for different formats, for new personalities. I loved the passionate debates happening on Tumblr around representation, separating the art from the artist, and more prickly fandom disagreements - and then I loved those conversations significantly less when they popped up again and again, on Twitter and Tumblr and YouTube and TikTok, with absolutely no progress made over time. All through these moments of dipping in and out of different bookish spaces online, though, I kept the Lesbrary. It began to seem more and more outdated. Who follows book blogs anymore? Who reads their online content anymore, instead of watching videos? (Hello, reader!) More significantly, I began to doubt whether there was a need for a sapphic book blog like mine anymore. More sapphic books are being published now than ever before, and more people are reading and promoting them. BookTok has a lively sapphic books section. I feel like I, in some small part, contributed to this environment, which I take pride in: if I can make the Lesbrary completely obsolete, I'll be happy.
Octavia Estelle Butler was named after two of the most important people in her life: her mother, Octavia Margaret Guy, and her grandmother, Estella. Her grandmother was an astonishing woman. She raised seven children on a plantation in Louisiana, chopping sugarcane, boiling laundry in hot cauldrons, and cooking and cleaning, not only for her family but for the white family that owned the land. There was no school for Black children, but Estella taught Octavia Margaret enough to read and write. As far as Butler could tell, her grandmother's life wasn't far removed from slavery - the only difference was she had worked hard enough and saved enough money to move everyone out west during the Great Migration, to Pasadena, California, in the early 1920s.
Butler would grow up to write and publish a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. She did not believe in talent as much as hard work. She never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they should learn, study, observe, and persist. Persistence was the lesson she received from her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt. In her lifetime, she would become the first published Black female science-fiction writer and be considered one of the forebears of Afrofuturism. "I may never get the chance to do all the things I want to do," a 17-year-old Butler wrote in her journals, now archived at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. "To write 1 (or more) best sellers, to initiate a new type of writing, to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes (in reverse order), and to sit my mother down in her own house before she is too old and tired to enjoy it."
What could you do in a billion hours?
Pottermore Publishing have announced that Harry Potter fans have clocked a massive one billion hours listening to the tale of the Boy Who Lived on Audible.
That's the same as someone listening to them for over 100,000 years.
Picture the scene. It's 2015. For more than 30 years, I've been in law enforcement with the Military and Metropolitan Police. I've spent that time chasing the worst criminals, doing surveillance, bugging cars, and working every hour available.
Now life is about to change radically. I'm retiring after a fabulous career and moving with my family to the Highlands of Scotland. We soon settle into a new life, with a totally different pace. Instead of getting up at 4am and spending all day following a suspected murderer, I'm walking the dog, cutting wood, or mowing my big new lawn.
But I'm not yet 50, so the question arises, what do I do next? I have always loved reading, so with hours of time on my hands, I thought, "I wonder if I could write a book?"
I'm not a historian, just a novelist who happens to be a history fanatic. So when I write a spy novel set during World War II, fake history is unacceptable. Even though my protagonist Alexsi and the situations he finds himself in may be fictional, the story has to be set within the context of real locations, real historical characters portrayed accurately, and an actual historical timeline.
As a history fanatic I feel obligated to offer my readers history that they may not necessarily be familiar with. My previous novel, A Single Spy, was set among the German exile colonies of Azerbaijan, Stalin%u2019s Russia, Nazi Germany, Iran, and a German plot to assassinate Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943. Readers clearly appreciated it, so obviously for The Double Agent I couldn%u2019t take the easy way out. Alexsi, who is interested only in personal survival, not ideology, had to make his way out of Iran after betraying both the Germans and the Russians, and being left disappointed in his offer of service to the British.